(It's been a busy week! I'm actually combining two Kickstarter update posts here, because things have happened so fast!)

Stretch Goal #4 unlocked: The Divine Comedy

Let the games begin!

Are you not entertained? We're 135% funded as of Tuesday night, and have unlocked our third extra content stretch goal!

This content is a little vaguer than the others, by design! While I've been coy about exactly what shape this story will take, it will act as something like a very extended minigame, which will unlock towards the later parts of the game. Participating in this event, you'll be forced to follow certain random instructions while completing tasks to accomplish the impossible feat of keeping Skrine sufficiently entertained.

While Skrine's currently in the demo, they're (far and away) the most well-hidden secret to those not already knowing where to look. In the full game, Skrine will be found near a variety of hub locations, and there will accordingly be more hints and opportunity to find the trickster.

This story will also involve some procedurally generated content, which I'm pretty excited to try working on!

Haven't checked out the Kickstarter yet? We're rocketing on with still over a week to go, have a gander!

Next up: Into the Whispering Deep (145%)

"Voices in the darkness – that's what people say echo throughout the deepest caves of Scrabdackle, or at least those who return. Journey across Scrabdackle to find the lost light as two unseen forces manipulate you to their own ends, and choose to extinguish its flames or banish the darkness."

The Whispering Deep is our next stretch goal story lined up, and widens the scope of the story to something a little more eldritch. Since Scrabdackle has non-linear progression, the greater story isn't constantly in-focus so much as acting as a backdrop to many of the smaller conflicts and stories you'll experience along the way. However, should you start down its story path, the Whispering Deep will introduce a greater plot as a second major threat to the world of Scrabdackle emerges from the Deep.

I don't want to hint too much else about this one yet - I hope it'll be creepy and good fun!

More about the Waking Fossil

Now that the Waking Fossil boss has been released for a few days, I wanted to share some of the background behind it!

As you might have heard/seen on the interview I did with 2 Left Thumbs, before Scrabdackle was Scrabdackle, it was a mutiplayer 'boss battle' game called Dream Wizards with almost no content except bosses. In its earliest form, it was a fairly common "divides in half every time you half-defeat it" type boss, with a very simple pattern of attack that was built for multiple players to be able to more-easily manage.

When I tried to turn the project into something different on my own in 2019, I kept the 'big skull' boss concept because I liked the art, but reworked the fight into something very different, with many more distinct patterns of attack that kept the (lone) player on their toes. It was generally much more intense and involved, and when I decided to finally add a major boss to the game mid-Kickstarter, it was easy to go to the skull boss again since I already had a battle pattern largely worked out, and since it fit an area already in the demo well.

Although certainly a lot more difficult than the introductory Little Lord fight, the skull boss (now reinvented as the Waking Fossil) has a very careful attack pattern meant to feel chaotic while being secretly predictable, and built entirely around the "tough but fair" philosophy that I feel strongly lends to a huge sense of accomplishment upon successfully overcoming it.

The boss' main behaviours are to charge at you, toss bombs that explode into orthagonal directions, and to cover the battlefield with damaging fire obstacles. Each attack is individually simple to avoid, but requires more mental management to dodge in combination with each other, since you are trying to keep track of static obstacles (the fire), static lines of damage (the bombs), and one dynamic line of damage (the charge) at the same time. And of course, the back half of the fight introduces some new things and turns up the heat overall!

While not all bosses in the game will be this challenging, I do plan to take this philosophy to every encounter I design. So far the reception to the fight has been exceptionally positive, so I'm really looking forward to being able to bring more crazy battles to the full game!

Friend of the Campaign #1: Zoe and the Cursed Dreamer

The Kickstarter for Zoe and the Cursed Dreamer just launched, and I want to tell you a bit about it and how excited I am for this game!

I've been aware of this project sinceI waded into the public sphere of indie game development last August, as creator Game Endeavor has been making very detailed video development logs on YouTube since around the same time. The devlogs are interesting not just from a developer or technical perspective, but also for their presentation and how they show the progress (as well as challenges) in game development! It's no surprise that recent devlogs have nearly half a million views.

Past the charming visuals, this project is also notable for its use of clever creature AI - one of the most popular devlogs talks about this in more detail, but each creature is aware of each other and positions themselves accordingly, and can be made to engage in combat with another enemy AI 'faction' without the player's input at all! There's a ton happening under the hood of this game, and I'm keen to see what Game Endeavor can do with three years of development budget :)

Game Endeavor was one of the first friends I made in the indiedev community, and I've been excited for him to launch his campaign for months! He's a very friendly and supportive guy with a huge amount of technical skill, and deserves a shot at getting to go full-time with Zoe and the Cursed Dreamer!

Friend of the Campaign #2: Blu

Blu just launched on Kickstarter yesterday, and is a beautiful action platformer game rendered in gorgeous stylized 3D. The creator Dam is a really nice guy, and the demo has already been very well-received! Take a look at the video, and the Kickstarter page if this fantasy adventure interests you!

What else is happening?

Peanut Wizard: The Peanut Wizard suggestion adventure games have been carrying on, with the Twitter image-based story seeing the Peanut Wizard being ruthlessly mocked outside the Wizard Academy, while the Youtube poll-based Peanut Wizard has constructed a "poison magic" wand from a smelly old orange speared on a stick. The Twitter edition will be slowing down a bit to 3/week instead of daily, as it's been a bit too much of a timesink for me, but the Youtube edition will be continuing daily if you still want to join in!

Alpha Beta Gamer: ABG is a legend in the indie dev community for playing tens of game demos and early releases a week, writing articles as well as posting a lot of gameplay videos to YouTube. They put up a Scrabdackle article last night, which has been really popular so far! Alpha Beta Gamer is another one of those content creators I was already subscribed to prior to starting the Scrabdackle journey, so it's really cool to see my own game get featured :)

Jake's wrap-up

The past week has been quite exciting with the new boss content, and breaking a few more stretch goals - but I have to admit that going into the final stretch, the wear of the campaign marathon is starting to catch up with me. The last time I wasn't working and thinking nonstop about the campaign was, uh... just over two months ago, at this point!

I meant to do one or two more articles last week to help promote the game, as well as stream some game demos for friends' projects, but I ended up hitting a wall late Saturday and taking Sunday to recuperate a bit. (I pretty much slept a full night's sleep two nights in a row, unusually, plus three naps over the weekend on top of that - and I'm still tired!)

Once the campaign ends on the 15th, I'm planning on taking the rest of that Thursday and the day after to try and wrap up the campaign from an administrative perspective, including getting some surveys out for handling rewards and setting expectations for certain deliverables - and after that, I'll be taking a week for self-care and recuperation.

I should be getting into actual game development again the last week of April, which I haven't truly done since the Lore Update (it's been since Jan 28th - I'm so excited!). Based on where I'm estimating the campaign will land funding-wise, as with the stretch goals funding more time to work on the project, the full game's release currently looks to be around late winter / early spring 2022 - but I'll be waiting to narrow that down and get more specific with a target release until much closer to.

I'll also be trying to take a step back from social media promotion for a while after the campaign, which takes a large tax both in energy and time. The plan right now is to continue posting regular informal as-I-work-on-it updates on the Discord server (where I will also do some developer art/music streams), and write up a monthly Kickstarter progress update summarizing development progress and status.

Thanks again everyone, and I'll see you for another update in a few days!

Jake